The LawBreakers 1.4 patch is going to bring some very big changes to the game, including increased health for all characters, out-of-combat health rengeneration, and a new "group spawning system" that will ensure players spawn more often with teammates instead of on their own.
"The main goal this patch is to increase average lifespans across the board," developer Boss Key Studios said, "as we've found that many of our players are spending significantly more time staring at a respawn screen than we'd like."
The studio aims to achieve five goals with this update:
- Extend the combat dance and create more interesting decisions about when commit to a fight or retreat to safety.
- Reduce the overall amount of insta-gibs.
- Provide more incentive to use abilities and combos in order to finish a fight.
- Health regen on all roles is about letting teams without a Battle Medic have a chance, who previously had too much of an impact on the outcome of a match. We were careful here not to adjust regen values too high, we want to preserve the viability of both Battle Medic and Harrier as excellent support roles.
- Health regen on all roles actually keep players in combat LONGER, which we’ve seen has been a positive change during internal testing. It increases players amount of action and fun rather than having them retreat to a health station.
It's a major switch, especially for a game that's not much more than a month old, but also one that's probably necessary. LawBreakers came out of the gate very slowly, and its fortunes haven't improved since: Its peak concurrent player count for today is 205, which actually puts it behind the famously tanked Mirage: Arcane Warfare. Boss Key boss Cliff Bleszinski said last week that he remains committed to making the game a success, and so it's a good bet that more big changes are on the way.
The 1.4 update also adds a new Skirmish mode, a new map called "Namsan" to the game—a preview of that is below—and makes the usual array of changes to characters and gameplay. The full patch notes are available on Steam.
